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Mark Zuckerberg Unleashes Facebook Search To The World

“Explore new places to eat and new bands to listen to—all through people you know”

Today, Mark Zuckerberg stood before the world and made a major Facebook announcement; a potential game changer. Their own in depth search product which focuses on People, Photos, Places & Interests.

The concept is that you can “Find more of what you’re looking for through your friends and connections” by asking question in plain English.

“With Graph Search you combine phrases (for example: ‘my friends in New York who like Jay-Z‘) to get that set of people, places, photos or other content that’s been shared on Facebook,” said Tom Stocky (product manager ) and Lars Rasmussen (engineering manager).

To me, this is a truly interesting spin and reverse approach that Google took. Facebook owns this data and information graph. It knows who, what, where, when and why you like things, as well as your friends & their friends. It’s now made this data accessible via an in-depth intuitive search with filters. I believe that this could become an invaluable research tool. As they demo search results like fav music of Obama fans vs. fav music of Romney fans, or search your friends by the language they speak, or where they work, its potential value as a resource makes a lot of sense. Another example finds out of any of your friends or their friends work for NASA.

It even can serve as a recommendation engine, looking for new restaurant, music, TV shows, or even a dentist? This search product is so powerful it can even serve up photos of your friends from a certain date or location. Want pictures of your friends when they were kids? Done

They want to make it clear this is not a web search engine but a Graph search with access to a set of people, places, photos, and other content. Facebook is pushing its search graph as a way to find the “answer” rather than “links that lead to the answer”

Some examples they provided were:

“Facebook’s “Graph Search” will help you answer Questions like “Who are my friends that live in San Francisco?”

Or Ask Facebook Search Which of my friends live in Palo Alto, CA & like Game of Thrones

Or find friends who like Star Wars & Harry Potter

Even set people up – Friends of Friends who are single search very power singles search potential

Privacy:

I have a feeling we’re going to see a lot of excited people, yet at the same time a huge privacy concern uproar. I’m confident Facebook is well on top of it and ready for the backlash. Privacy is always a huge concern, and it’s bitten them in the ass before.

According to the Facebook Graph Search privacy section:

Your privacy choices determine what’s searchable

With Graph Search, you can look up anything shared with you on Facebook, and others can find stuff you’ve shared with them, including content set to Public. That means different people see different results.

Facebook says they will promote new & better privacy tools soon. New views to see “who can you your stuff”

So stay tuned, we will see just how much privacy control they really give you.

Gamechanger, yes Google killer, not right now

“If It’s Not In Graph Search, Facebook Hands Your Query Off To Bing”

What is huge about it and a potential market share issue for Google is the fact that Facebook will handoff any searches deemed outside the scope of their Graph to Bing, while already a partner, this may not seem big, but it is. As the Facebook Graph Search becomes widely adopted people are going to use Facebook for data & research, and I predict it will garner a mass adoption. With this search traffic increase will come a vast more searches provided to Bing by default. I truly believe we will see Bing benefit and gain market share due to this. One more integration to be noted is that they demonstrated an example of Bing weather being served live on Facebook.

Not only is this a search product that didn’t quite exist before, but I see a huge revenue stream for Facebook via targeted interests for advertisers, based on search. We played Facebook, Well played

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